Wednesday, May 11, 2011

The Rest of Our Thrifty Abode Part II

Our tour continues today with the second and third floors of our house.

Disclaimer: You are about to see some mess.

Here's how our second floor is laid out:

In the last post I mentioned how we had a lot of wall space and hallway in our house. See what I mean? Only two windows on the whole floor. It's not really that noticeable until you start decorating and there are big open expanses of wall to fill. Other than that, having so few windows is not problematic and the window in each room does a good job of giving enough natural light.

This hallway leading to the two bedrooms is my arch enemy #2. It is the catchall space for everything that doesn't have a home of it's own (or that I'm too lazy to put in it's place the second I'm done with it). The laundry room is also just to the left, so piles of laundry (I think you can see a little bit of one in the bottom left corner) end up in the hallway. There's a full bathroom to the left before you get to the two bedrooms that's a lot like the powder room on the first floor. I haven't done and thing to it. It's pretty far down on my priority list so I didn't even bother taking pictures of it.

My main goals for the hallway:
-find a way to keep it clutter free
-gallery wall of family photos between the laundry and bathroom

This is the room on the left, the nursery. I'm currently in the middle of re-doing most of it. I'd had it mostly finished, but we kept having issues with the window treatment. The old one had to go because our house is east-facing, so we really needed a way to black out the windows in order to have successful naps. Plus my previous curtain looked way too matchy-matchy. What's in the room right now is one panel of my DIY sun blocking, striped curtains (I will be posting a how-to in the near future as soon as I finish the other one).

Here's what I have in mind to get this room finished up:
-finish the other curtain panel
-finish the art work above the crib
-put a gallery wall on the wall with the changing table
-find somewhere to hang my Ikea shelves since I put the ones that were in the nursery in my living room

This is how it used to look with the shelves and old window treatment in case you're curious:

The bedroom to the right is our guest room.

Yikes, right? This room is the most neglected space in the house. It used to be our office with a daybed, but it's mostly served as a giant closet. If we don't know what to do with something, it goes in that room. Every few months or so I have to reorganize all the clutter that's found its way there. I'd love for this to be a beautiful and inviting guest room someday, but I don't really have a specific plan in my head yet. I almost don't want to do too much because by the time I'm finished we may have to use this room for baby #2. (which may still be years away... I'm just that slow at decorating)

Our third floor makes up for the fact that our first floor living space is so small. Our master suite is pretty huge and it takes up all of our third floor.

We've just recently started to really live in this space. We used to just sleep here, but now that our office stuff is in our master suite we're really making the most out of the square footage.

This is how the furniture used to be laid out:

Our queen size bed looked so small and lost in our huge room that I decided to break the room up into two distinct spaces and move our office furniture from the guest bedroom up into our bedroom.

This is how our furniture is laid out now:

There really isn't much to show in this room. I only have one picture of the bed so you can kind of get a feel of the colors I'm working with.

As you can see I'm working on picking a paint color. Still haven't decided. This room is kind of overwhelming because there is so much of it.

These are my ideas so far:
-paint the walls
-new window treatments
-chair, ginormous mirror, and rug for a sitting/changing area
-new night stands and move those to the guest room
-put stuff on the walls

Well, that's it. Our little, awkward, practically windowless townhouse. I hope you'll stick with me as I jump from room to room to get the place decorated!